Consensus is that we’ve hit a tipping point and the retail industry is finally seeing some major collateral damage from Amazon’s monster growth — and mainstream/non-tech news has started giving this a lot of coverage.

New communications tools are on the rise, including instant messaging applications. 43% of respondents said they used these tools at work. Not surprisingly, instant messaging is widely popular in the tech industry, where 71% percent of employees rely on the application.

Artificial Intelligence is dramatically changing business, and chatbots, fueled by AI, are becoming a viable customer service channel. The best ones deliver a customer experience in which customers cannot tell if they are communicating with a human or a computer.

The wave of hype and excitement about microservices continues unabated. Understanding exactly why and how your organisation will benefit from a microservice architecture is an important first step to adoption and shouldn’t be left as an afterthought.

Every now and then, all developer products (SDKs, frameworks, APIs) will have to choose between favoring their existing ones or new ones. Make the initial app “just work” for beginners with some default magic? You hurt the debuggability of large apps.